No, book banners are not protecting children. They're getting them drunk and punching them.

The rallying cry of book banners nation wide is always the same.  “We’re doing it to protect the children!” they proclaim.  Yes, all their efforts to rip books—books!—away from students and kids is in a tireless effort to protect them from the dangerous contents of libraries.  So they say.

It is an argument that rings particularly hollow given how little interest they seem to show in legislation that would actually protect the lives of children. But just how disingenuous is their insistence that they want to take away books for the sake of student safety?

Would someone interested in protecting kids provide them with alcohol, and then when one refuses to drink it, punch that child in the face?

Seems crazy, right? Too crazy too be true?

Not exactly.

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Fox News recently reported that detailed this exact situation unfolding in a Philadelphia suburb.  A former, right-wing candidate for the state’s Lieutenant governor position, Clarice Schillinger, was arrested after hosting a drinking party for her daughter’s teenage friends, which ended in her punching one of them repeatedly when he tried to leave.  The student attempted to leave the party and was not only restrained by Schillinger, but assaulted by her.

And evidently, this was not the first time she had been investigated for such conduct. In fact, it was the second time in a week that police had to be called to her residence on reports of underage drinking.

In both cases, more than a dozen teenage students from the area were furnished with alcohol by Ms. Schillinger and her family, and in both cases, the parties turned violent.

Namely on the side of the adults.

Clarice is not the only person who struck some of the students. Police reports indicate that her mother and boyfriend, both far older than the students and children they were hosting, also became so drunk they assaulted several of the kids. Apparently, this is a regular occurrence at this particular household. Getting drunk and hitting children.

But Schillinger is interested in protecting kids from books. Not from alcohol or violent adults.

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Her 2022 campaign run was “more focused on these woke and gender ideas,” according to her. So called ‘woke and gender’ ideas tend to be the main boogieman that book banners hold up as what they need to protect students from. If you look at any list of the most commonly banned books in states across the nation, you will find it filled with books that are challenged because they present the perspectives of diverse peoples. But, to a particularly extreme coalition, this is viewed as ‘woke indoctrination’ and is something that needs to be kept out of schools and libraries.

The idea that kids need to be protected from books is patently laughable. Reading and literacy has been categorically shown time and time again, in study after study, to increase empathy, improve graduation success rates, and just the presence of a library in a community has been shown to reduce crime.

Books are not a threat to kids. Books improve their lives dramatically, and put them on a path to success.

What is a threat to kids, are adults who force alcohol on them and beat them when they don’t want to drink it. What is a threat to kids, is a toxic home environment where every grown up gets so drunk so often that they become violent with the children. Cycles of abuse and intoxication are actual threats to minors.

Not books.

Clarise Schillinger would probably know that if she spent less time pushing alcohol on her daughter’s teenage friends, and more time reading.

But it’s all to protect the kids, right?